


Esperanza

by sophinisba



Category: Saved! (2004)
Genre: Biblical Referenc, Epistolary, F/M, Future Fic, Languages and Linguistics, Religion, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:24:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary's daughter, grown up enough to have her own religious struggles, writes a letter to Cass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Esperanza

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



> A 2007 Yuletide Treat for Kass, whose requests included OCs and religious geekery.

Dear Cass,

Thank you so much for your letter. I'm starting to wonder if any of my friends from school actually know how to send one. They keep sending me e-mails and asking why I don't write back as much. They just don't seem to get that not every village in southern Venezuela has broadband wireless in every house.

I honestly don't miss it though. I don't miss the Internet or the packaged food or the mall. I miss my parents and my friends. I've been spending a lot more time outside than I do most summers. Lots of time just playing cards, playing soccer, or sitting around talking. I've been walking a lot but I'm learning to walk slower than I would at home. It's taken me some time to get used to, well, taking my time, not being in a hurry all the time.

Like I said in my other letter, I've been spending a lot of time with Matías, my Grandma Ann's son with Emilio, the pastor of the evangelical church here. My grandma and Emilio got together right around the time my parents did (and you and Roland) and Matías was born a little less than a year after I was. We hung out a lot the other two summers I came here too, when I was younger. The first time I came here, when I was seven and he was six, he was the one who had the idea to call me Esperanza, which is Spanish for my real name. I remember that at the time I thought that was great because it reminded me of Esmeralda from the _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ (we had the cartoon version at home), but now I get how smart it was because it's so much easier for most people here to pronounce, so it made it easier for them to talk to me, even though I barely understood anything they were saying back then.

My Spanish is _so_ much better now, Cass, you wouldn't believe. I think it's been just the right combination, having that balance, learning the grammar in school the last three years and then getting the real practice speaking this summer. I still have an accent and maybe I always will, but I can say just about anything I want to say now, and it's like having a whole other personality. Not that I'm fake or that I'm not myself, but it's another way of expressing myself and, yeah, it gives me the feeling that what I'm expressing isn't quite the same as the person I am at home either. I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense. Anyway, I love it. I'm definitely planning on coming back next summer, and I'd like to stay longer, maybe a year, maybe more than that - not necessarily here in Río Santo, but maybe in Puerto Ayacucho or even Caracas.

Sometimes I get to wondering what it would be like if my dad had stayed here with his mom after his parents got divorced, what it would have been like growing up in Río Santo. Like how I'd still speak both languages but I'd have an accent in English instead of in Spanish. Church would still be a really big part of my life, but it would be a whole different kind of church, and I'd be used to having communion with just the twenty other people that go there instead of the two thousand that go to Dean's church. Maybe I'd like it better, but sometimes I think I would've been bored, or maybe I would've rebelled, because they're so much stricter than we are about doctrine. I wonder if we all would've lived in the same house, and Matías and I would've grown up like brother and sister.

But then of course I catch myself and remember that if my dad had stayed here he would never have met my mom. She still would've had me because she was pregnant before she met him, but maybe she would've married someone else, or maybe I wouldn't have a dad at all. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't be here with him, or with Matías.

I'm kind of dancing around what I really want to talk about here, in case you hadn't noticed. Um, thanks for all the stuff you told me in your letter about sex. When I asked you about it before I was thinking more about what men and women do in general, but the truth is I'd always been curious about you and Roland too, not to mention threesomes, and especially the stuff about oral sex. So, yeah, all the details are definitely details I wanted to know. And it's not like I can really talk to my mom and dad or Dean and Ken about it. I mean, they're supportive and everything, and they always told me it's okay to love who I want, and if I were gay they'd be happy for me too, and I know not all kids are that lucky. But that doesn't mean I can talk to them about sex as in actual sex. So, yeah, I'm lucky to have the four parents I have, but I'm lucky I have you too.

Okay, here's the big thing I should have told you in my last letter and didn't: I wasn't just thinking about men and women in general either. I wasn't thinking hypothetical. I was thinking about Matías and how much I want to have sex with him. I think about this pretty much all the time.

Which is another reason I can't talk to my parents about it, right? Because, Hello! Incest! How am I supposed to tell my dad that I'm in love with his half-brother? That's fucked up, right? And even somebody who's happy to help raise the child of a teenage girl and her gay ex-boyfriend is not going to be okay with sex between a girl and her (you have no idea how much I've come to loathe this word) uncle.

Except that it's not really incest at all, because we're not actually blood relatives. I mean, if you wanted to say that everybody who ever gets married disqualifies all their relatives from having sex with each other, then our family would've been damned to hell (in many, many ways) when I was still a baby. It would mean that when my Grandma Lillian married my Grandpa Skip then her daughter and his son became like brother and sister, when they were already dating, and that's just. I mean. Yeah. But it all worked out for them. Hell, it worked out great, and I wouldn't want my family made up any other way. Unless, you know, it could be arranged in a way that no one thought of me as being in any way related to Matías. :-(

Yesterday we were reading Leviticus. I know, Leviticus! It's like it's a bad word or something in Dean's church. I always think of it as the book with all the rules about mildew and homosexuality that just aren't part of our lives anymore, so I never paid much attention to it, but in Emilio's church people read the Bible all the way through. Matías says it doesn't make sense to pick and choose when it's all God's word. He's read the whole thing before and he has this great memory, so he knows right away that if we want to get the details of God's views about incest, we need to go to Leviticus 18. (I thought about bringing up Genesis 19 and Lot's daughters, but we'd already argued about Sodom so I decided to leave that one alone for now.)

He gets out his Bible, which of course is in Spanish, and I get out mine, which is in English. We've done this before as a way for me to work on my Spanish. We read some of my favorite passages, like Psalms or parts of the Gospels that I know by heart in English, so if I can make sense of them in Spanish it gives me a really special feeling, sort of like Pentecost only even better because I actually understand what it all means. Do you ever feel that way about Hebrew?

I should tell you that the Bible's partly to blame for us getting together anyway. I mean, I know we're responsible for our own actions and everything, and I'm responsible for opening it up to Song of Solomon two weeks ago. But once I did that, it was beyond my control. Have you ever tried reading that book with a really hot guy sitting next to you, patiently explaining the unfamiliar words to you and helping you move your lips differently so you'll make that Spanish sound that's in between an English b and a v? The first verse in Spanish is "¡Oh, que él me _besara_ con los _besos_ de su _boca_! Mejor que el _vino_ es tu amor. " I mean, how was I _not_ supposed to kiss him after I said that?

Like I said, that was two weeks ago, that we read the Cantar de los Cantares together and we finally kissed. It lasted for like five minutes and then we stopped, and we started arguing, and unfortunately I haven't gotten him to touch me again since then. He says this is wrong and I wanted to know why he kissed me so hard and why he had an erection if he didn't really want it (and yes, I got from your letter that there's a difference between what I guy actually wants and what makes him hard, but it wasn't just that. It's in his eyes too. It's in every part of him). But he said that none of that even matters, what matters is what God wants.

So anyway, yesterday he's reading out loud from Leviticus 18: "No descubrirás la desnudez de tu hermana, hija de tu padre o hija de tu madre, nacida en casa o nacida fuera de ella." That means, "You will not discover the nakedness of your sister, daughter of your father or daughter of your mother, born in your home or outside it." Which sounds kind of worrisome, because it's saying it doesn't matter whether you were raised as relatives or not, that it's still not allowed.

I look at my English version and the same verse starts out "You shall not have intercourse," which, whatever, I guess it's kind of a weird thing to see in the Bible, but it's weird like health class is weird, or like when the doctor asks you about your period when your dad is sitting right there is weird. But _discovering someone's nakedness_? That's weird and also hot, like Song of Solomon is weird and hot. I'm sitting there trying to be earnest and figure out how to convince him that God wants us to be together, but now all I can think about is the ways Matías might _discover my nakedness_. Like he's an explorer or something, and I'm just lying there in my nakedness like some little island in the South Pacific, or like the woman in Song of Solomon whose breasts are like twin gazelles. I'm picturing him pulling away a veil and finding my nakedness and then, um, doing some of the stuff you talked about in your letter.

Meanwhile he keeps reading, going through this whole list of relatives, and every verse starts out with the thing about discovering their nakedness. The part that gets closest to uncle and niece goes like this: "You will not discover the nakedness of the sister of your father. She is a close relative of your father."

"What about the _brother_ of your father though?" I said. "Or the half-brother of your adopted father? Does it say anything about that?"

"It wouldn't say anything about which men you can be with," said Matías, "because it's only addressed to men."

"Right, and being with another man is an abomination, like it says in verse twenty-two." See, if I said that to someone at home, someone who's actually part of my _family_, we would roll our eyes and understand that that wasn't really a rule that was going to keep people who love each other apart, but Matías just nods. This is one more reason why it's so frustrating to be in love with him, but I can't help myself. "Okay," I say. "Does that mean since I'm a girl there are no rules and I can do whatever I want?"

He doesn't like it when I joke around about this kind of thing. I try telling him what they say out our church at home, how God is still speaking. Dean always says the Bible is part of the story of God's relationship with his people, but it's not the whole story - there are parts that still have to be written. Matías says if that's true then we can all just do whatever we want and _then_ decide that God agrees with us.

The thing is, we read over the list four times and it doesn't actually say anything about the nakedness of the daughter of your brother. So I say, "Fine, even if you want to be a fundamentalist and base your life on a literal reading of Leviticus, we're still allowed to be together."

But he just says he needs more time to think about it, and he walks away and leaves me sitting there alone. Thinking about it. And pretty soon I started feeling guilty. Not because of the incest thing - I'm still pretty sure we're okay as far as that goes - but because Matías really looked unhappy when he left, really worried, and I wasn't exactly very supportive. I was practically laughing at his beliefs, and what kind of a person does that make me? What kind of girlfriend, or what kind of plain old friend?

I don't know what to do now.  
All my life I've been taught that Jesus loves everybody, and that I should respect everyone's way of coming to God, or even their choice not to. I sometimes think acceptance is the only thing holding the people at our church together, when our actual ideas about religion are so different. I know the choir director worships God as a mother, one of my Sunday school teachers was Jewish, and the director of the youth program is an atheist. And whenever I see Dean with any of them, he looks so fricking happy, like as a pastor he can't believe how lucky he is to have such great people as part of his church. And it's true, they all _are_ great people and they do a great job, but you'd think it would make a difference to him that they're not actually Christians. What business do we even have getting together every Sunday if we don't have the same beliefs?

It makes me think of when Dean first got ordained and then got the placement, and my mom and dad and Grandma Lillian were so happy for him, and I was so excited that we'd all be able to go to the same church now, and I couldn't figure out why you and Roland wouldn't join too. I figured since we were all friends and they kept saying at church that everyone was welcome, you two had no reason to stay away. Roland just smiled at me and said it was because you liked to sleep in on Sundays, but you sat me down and told me there was a big difference between liking people and sharing a religion.

Do you even remember this? Maybe you've had these conversations so many times that it wasn't a big deal for you, but it was huge for me. I think I must have been about eight, and I started crying. I said, "But it doesn't _matter_ that you're Jewish. They love _everybody_." And you just laughed and hugged me and said it wasn't that, that you didn't want to be part of a Jewish congregation either. It didn't matter how nice the people were, you just didn't want religion to be part of your life. Obviously you've changed your mind about that since then and I think it's awesome that you have that now, not just the people see at temple but having a religion that tells you how to live your life...

Can you tell I'm a little bit jealous? I'm starting to think that _I_ don't want religion in my life anymore if all it's going to do is tell me that what I want is okay. Maybe Matías is right and I'm just doing whatever I want and then deciding it's what God wants too. Maybe I should join a church like his (or a temple like yours?) that actually has something to say about right and wrong.

You must think I'm so incredibly spoiled. I'm rebelling against the fact that the church I grew up in hasn't given me anything to rebel against! Maybe it's just sexual frustration, I don't know! It's the uncertainty that's killing me. I'm only here for two more weeks and I'll probably still be a virginal undiscovered island at the end of it. I wish I could stay longer (and not have to go back to school next month), but part of me is just sick to death of this tension.

There's a chance Matías can come to visit me in the States in December. Maybe he'll have enough time before then to figure out what God wants for him.

If my mom and dad introduce him to anybody as my uncle, even if they're just joking about it, I will not be responsible for my actions.

Thanks for listening, Cass, and wish me luck, whatever you think that means. I love knowing I can always trust you. I can't wait to see you again in a couple weeks and hug you and talk this all out in person.

Love,

Hope


End file.
